Re difficulty in general I was excited to try the game because it looked hard and I like the idea of trying to scrape a living in a hostile environment and slowly work up. But I soon found out that you can't die, there are big shiny ships everywhere just floating around waiting for you to put crew on, you get paid hefty sums for doing literally nothing and truly ludicrous income from building your own space empire in a couple of years, etc. etc. The 'story points' are just another dose of this painful lack of difficulty, which is strange for a game of this kind. It's like it's trying to cater to a general audience. Let's face it, nobody is going to play this game except nerds
Unfortunately, as with any game, one difficulty doesn't really fit all players. As it is, Starsector only has two immediately accessible difficulties, easy and normal. Alex has expressed the opinion that he'd rather see in game switches be available to make the game easier or harder as the player desires. Things like story points or taking commissions with factions.
I'll note many people told Alex in RC9 the payouts for missions were too low, so Alex boosted them in RC10. Players were still told him they were too low, so they were boosted in RC14 as well. So despite your claim, there are people on these forums stating the opposite in terms of difficulty.
On the bright side, Starsector is highly configurable and moddable. If I'm not experimenting, I'll generally run a spacer start plus iron man. If you're not aware, Spacer eliminates the starting income, and replaces it with a debt payed monthly that scales with character level. It can turned on using a text editor to modify:
Starector/starsectore-core/data/config/settings.json
Change line 216 (at least in my config file):
"enableSpacerStart":false,
to
"enableSpacerStart":true,
There are a number of settings in there that can also be changed to make things easier or harder, but is a bit much to go through here. As a quick example though, one could change
"storyPointsPerLevel":4,
to
"storyPointsPerLevel":1,
There are also mods aimed specifically at increasing difficulty, such as Ruthless sector, found in the mod section of the forums.
I agree, once you've hit well developed colonies, credits become a non-issue. Alex I believe is still planning out what the end game enemy or enemies will be that require such vast wealth. Its one of the reasons colony growth was tuned lower this release. Although Nexerlin (essentially a 4X mod) adds a "starfarer" option which reduces growth by a factor of 2 again, and reduces income by 10% (leaving expenses alone). Similarly the settings.json file includes upkeep and income multipliers one could increase and decrease.
As noted in this thread, the game is actually closer to an table top RPG than a space computer game that can be lost like Stellaris or FTL, for example. You can suffer setbacks, and even be sent back to square one in terms of wealth, but if you want to continue playing, the game will let you, similar to how a GM will often make players roll up new characters and continue on after a total party kill.